


Mid-Flight

by cruisedirector



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Airplanes, Children, Desert Island Fic, Dialogue Heavy, Episode s03e25 Worst Case Scenario, Episode s04e11 Concerning Flight, Episode: s02e25 Resolutions, Episode: s03e11 Q and the Grey, Episode: s03e15 Coda, Exploration, F/M, Historical, Holodecks/Holosuites, Maquis, Mountaineering, New Earth, Pilots, Romance, Star-crossed, Wedding Rings, Workplace Relationship, air heart, episode s03e17 Unity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2001-12-21
Updated: 2001-12-21
Packaged: 2017-10-04 22:59:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 16,628
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/35016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cruisedirector/pseuds/cruisedirector
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A five-part drama about Kathryn's affection for flying machines and holograms and Chakotay's affection for Kathryn.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Soaring

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mamadracula](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mamadracula/gifts), [trekybecky](https://archiveofourown.org/users/trekybecky/gifts).



> I thought Part One, an unimportant little sequel to "Concerning Flight," was all I was going to write, but when Chakotay said the line about the plane, I knew there was another story there. So I let him talk all he wanted to talk, and, as you will discover, it was hard to shut him up; I like these characters a lot, but this bears no resemblance to anything which would happen on the show or which would pass muster in a writing course. Some of the material about Kathryn Janeway's background, particularly her interaction with holograms and Amelia Earhart, are taken from Jeri Taylor's novel _Mosaic_ and Bobby and Cody Weiss' Starfleet Academy novel _Lifeline_. Many thanks to maquismom for talking about it, to lauawill for extensive feedback and debate, and to mamadracula who demanded that this be written. I wrote the scene with the rings for trekybecky a very long time ago.

"Two tricorders, one-nineteenth of the rations, three phasers, a conduit shield..." Wearing something close to a frown, Tuvok rattled off the equipment Voyager had lost, but Chakotay could see that Janeway wasn't overly concerned. She was barely listening, in fact. They'd gotten back the computer processor, the holo-emitter, the site-to-site transporter, the photon casings, and most of what had been taken from storage--plus that flying contraption which she'd stored in the cargo bay, then beamed to the holodeck when she thought nobody was paying attention. Not a bad price to see her smiling, Chakotay admitted to himself, though he still wished he could lecture her about taking unnecessary risks. Well, Tuvok had undoubtedly taken care of that for him. He flashed the Vulcan a smile, and received a raised brow in turn. "You do not seem troubled by the supply loss, Commander."

The captain answered for him. "It's hardly consequential, Tuvok, the only real problem's going to be the coolant fusion coupling to the warp plasma emitter, and B'Elanna's already taking care of that. I'd say we're in pretty good shape." Janeway's body language shifted subtly towards her first officer. "Now, am I to understand that I missed a fight between Torres and Seven in the mess hall?" She looked expectantly at Chakotay while the Vulcan's expression settled into resigned displeasure.

Chakotay grinned back. "I don't think it came to blows, Captain."

"I shall have to have a little talk with that protege of mine...both of them. Not right now, though. I've got the holodeck reserved. So if you'll excuse me, gentlemen?" A hand on his shoulder as she passed, then she was headed out the door and towards the turbolift.

****

Half an hour later, Torres was having more trouble than any of them expected with the coolant system. Paris offered to go down to engineering to help, but Chakotay merely lowered his brows and pointed at the lieutenant's seat. "Well, it was worth a try," Tom muttered, and Chakotay swallowed a smile in spite of himself. He decided it was worth interrupting Janeway to inform her that they'd be dropping out of warp--she'd know anyway, she could feel such changes in her ship, but she usually liked the courtesy of being informed so she didn't have to contact the bridge herself, usually in more annoyance than if they simply broke the news to her.

But when he tried to contact her on the holodeck, he received no response, either over the general comm system or his own communicator. Tuvok had no luck either. The holodeck wasn't locked and her life signs were stable. Maybe, Chakotay thought, she'd managed to fall really deeply asleep.

"Shall I use emergency communications override?" Tuvok was asking.

"No. I'll get her."

When he found the captain on the holodeck, he discovered the reason for her silence: she had engaged the privacy override for the general comm system, but her communicator pin had fallen between two rocks, and she was trying to retrieve it when he spotted her, several dozen meters above him. She was scaling a high cliff. He murmured a command to the holographic controls, instantly placing him mere meters away from her. Kathryn's eyes widened when she saw him, and he wondered who stared more intensely. She was panting from exertion, wearing a tight red and black climbing suit; the sleek material clung to her chest as it moved, it was streaked with moisture across her back, under her arms, and in the creases where her legs met her torso. He had to drop his gaze as he approached her.

She leaned back against a jutting rock, pushing her hair back from her eyes, as he explained the problem with the coolant system generator. He looked at the cliff face rather than directly at her, avoiding her eyes and especially glancing at her body, so perhaps he merely imagined the slow amusement which crept across her features. When he finished, she began a lengthy explanation of what she wanted done.

"...so if we feed the binary coupling through the fusion chamber, it should be possible to keep the temperatures down until the coolant drains." He nodded, and she stepped forward abruptly. "You haven't been paying attention to a word I've said."

He turned his face to her slightly, keeping his body tilted away. "If we feed the binary coupling through the fusion chamber, it should be possible to keep the temperatures down until the coolant drains. Was that it?" She nodded. "Captain, I assure you, I was paying attention to you." She shook her hair back again and waited, hands on her hips, which curved much more dramatically in the climbing suit...

He slapped his communicator pin. "Chakotay to Torres. The captain suggests that if you unlock the primary coolant storage unit..."

"Working on it, Commander, we've already reinitialized the system," B'Elanna's voice came through, reporting on their progress. He reported Janeway's orders verbatim, watching as she shook her head.

"This might take a couple of hours," Torres reported. "We can't go to warp."

"Notify Tuvok. And let me know when you've finished."

"Understood, Commander," the engineer said. Chakotay broke the link, turning back to Janeway.

"You want to go back to scaling that mountain, Captain?"

She smiled enigmatically. "Want to come with me?"

"I don't know. What's up there?"

"A flying machine," she grinned, and took his arm. "Come on. The cliff levels off after this next outcropping. And I brought spare rope."

****

He was elated at the invitation, though he couldn't quite think why. This was as close as they ever got--these rare occasions when she let him into her private sanctuary, rather than a hologram or a crewmember who was so clearly a subordinate that there was no risk of her authority being questioned. When he was here with her, in the middle of the experience, it was enough. Later, when he was alone in his quarters, remembering what she had looked like in these clothes, wind blowing her hair about her face, squinting into the artificial sun, relaxed and captivating, then he would ache for more.

"What exactly are we climbing to?" he asked her, and she smiled mischievously. "Not that thing you and your hologram took off the side of the cliff on that planet...?"

"The very same. Well, not the very same. I've made a couple of structural improvements on Maestro Da Vinci's model. Scared, Chakotay?" she teased.

"'Captain and First Officer Die In Tragic Holodeck Accident,'" he mused. "It would make an interesting broadcast for Neelix's briefing. I don't think I'd want to hear my eulogy--Tuvok would probably give it."

"He'd be too busy with mine," she laughed. "Warning everyone to let it be a lesson about not taking unnecessary risks." He considered whether to echo the sentiment, remind her that she was the captain and therefore irreplaceable. He could see the glider outlined against the false sky of the holodeck, mere meters above their heads despite the illusion. "I bet Tom would give your eulogy," Kathryn mused, interrupting his thoughts.

"Tom Paris?" He made a face at her. "Why him of all people?"

"He's known you the longest of any of the main crew, hasn't he?" she guessed, correctly. "And B'Elanna would be too broken up by your death..." A shadow passed across Kathryn's face. "Or maybe not. This is too serious a conversation to be having on a day like this." She resumed the climb to the summit.

After a few moments of silence, he asked, "Why?"

"Why what?"

"What you were saying about Tom and B'Elanna."

A few feet from the glider, she stopped and turned to face him. "I heard B'Elanna give a eulogy once."

He raised an eyebrow in surprise. "Anyone I know?"

"Yes, in fact. Me." At his reaction, she continued, "You remember that shuttle crash...the one where that alien..."

"Where I tried to revive you, and you had a vision of dying. I remember." It wasn't likely he would ever forget that experience, though it had occupied less than an hour of his life. Again he considered echoing Tuvok's warnings to her, though on that day when they had almost lost her, it could have applied to himself as well. Tuvok had lectured both of them afterwards--the two command officers taking a shuttle together into an unknown environment--the loss could have been devastating for the ship. They hadn't been alone together on a mission since the away mission on which they'd both been infected with the virus that almost stranded them permanently.

He wondered whether that recognition had played any role in Kathryn's mostly unilateral decision to promote the Vulcan. She had not been alone on a mission with her first officer since. Tuvok had gotten to accompany her on this latest away team, where she had found Da Vinci wearing the holo-emitter. Curious, he thought, that Torres rather than himself had given her eulogy in her vision.

"What did B'Elanna say?" he asked.

"Nothing important...what I'd hoped she'd say, I guess. That I made her recognize her own strengths and that sort of thing." She averted her face, embarrassed.

"What did I say?"

"You didn't say much, then--you were being the captain. Being strong for the crew." Turning, she resumed her approach to the craft.

He followed, watching the wind lift her hair from her neck and swirl it around her face. "She would say that, you know. That you taught her to take different kinds of risks." Kathryn looked startled.

"If you want to put it that way. Here we are." She pointed, directing his gaze out over the side of the cliff into the unknown.

****

The drop looked impressive. Though he knew it could be no more than twenty meters at maximum based on the holodeck specifications, Chakotay experienced vertigo looking down from the edge. Far below, a river coursed lazily between the hills, but there were many steep cliffs jutting between their present location and that sylvan scene. Even Kathryn seemed a bit taken aback as she glanced down.

"Sure you want to do this?" he asked.

"The safeties are on."

"We could turn them off, if it would make this more exciting for you." He was mostly kidding, but he wasn't sure what to make of her expression. "Or maybe not. It would be a faster ride if you clipped in this fabric," he noted, changing the subject.

It took a few minutes of preparation, sweating in the sun as they tightened connections and tested the controls. She would ride in front, the wind in her face, steering; he would be merely her passenger. Not an unaccustomed position. He was grateful that she was letting him come along for the ride. She waited for him to wrap his hands in the slender wires that connected the wings to the body, to fold his body inside the fragile-looking structure; he watched her watching him, studying the size of his hands, the breadth of his torso against the metal. Wondered what she was thinking. She swung herself easily into the machine as they took off.

****

And then they were flying.

****

He'd been hangliding before, and had paraskiied down some pretty tough mountains, but this was unlike either experience. The wind seemed to whip straight through the little plane, unexpectedly chilly in his face; he squinted against the glare to see her throw her head back, exhilarated. The tendons in her neck stood out, white-knuckled fingers gripped the metal; her mouth was slightly open, back arched. A wave of desire rolled over him, sending goosebumps along his arms even as he broke into a fresh sweat, and then a burst of fierce pleasure as the wind sent them soaring upward, floating suspended for a moment before they began to descend. He was surprised at how much power she had over the little craft, using her entire body to work the limited controls. He was breathing hard by the time they landed, gaping at her in uncontrolled adoration, his pupils dilated from the wind and sun and the sight of her perched on the edge of eternity.

The craft jolted hard as they set down, sending her sprawling in the grass. He leaped out after her, concerned, but the holographic ground cushioned her fall; she had already rolled to her knees by the time he squatted beside her in the field. He pulled her to her feet, both her hands in his.

"Thank you," he said. And drew her a little too close, almost reflexively from the momentum of stumbling upright with her, but the motion made it necessary for him to catch her, putting his hands on her shoulders as her lower body bumped his. And her hands landed on his chest, fumbling while she struggled for balance. He looked down at her at the precise moment she glanced up at him, their faces nearly colliding.

For five heartstopping seconds, he thought she wasn't going to turn away. Her heart was pounding against him, she was panting, maybe in delayed reaction to the flight and to falling. Or maybe not.

"Chakotay," she said. "You're, uh, you're welcome." Shaking her head as if to clear it, she pushed back from him, hands sliding slippery down his chest. He watched her wipe her fingers on her slick suit as she turned, looking back at the little craft. "I don't suppose it's practical to store this. It'll have to be dismantled."

"We have plenty of room. And plenty of time."

"We need the material in the struts. And it's not likely we'll have a chance to get back to it anytime soon." She looked a little regretful, and a little relieved, as she started walking across the grass away from the vehicle in what he supposed she knew to be the direction of the arch.

The end. Something had been decided too quickly, not just the fate of the little glider. It was enough to make him dizzy. He turned back to the machine, putting his hands on it.

"What are you doing?" he heard her ask from some distance away. Her voice grew stronger as she approached. "It's silly to get nostalgic about it, Chakotay. We can always create a holographic one."

"It won't be the same thing. You have less of a problem than I do replacing real life with holograms."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"I think you like the safety protocols."

He was getting close to dangerous territory. They had an unspoken rule, or at least Kathryn did: they never discussed their relationship, not directly, not even in metaphor since that night on New Earth. A firewall. The distance meant that he could be forgiven for things like his affection for Riley Frasier and his lingering antipathy for Seven. She thought it was a fair balance.

"You're right. I do."

"But it's all right for you to lead an away mission where you might get killed. Sometimes I think you're very brave. But sometimes I think you like to pretend the safeties are always on."

"There's always some risk. Even the safeties can't account for all the variables."

"My point exactly." He turned to her, and she looked away, troubled. He wanted to put a hand on her shoulder, make her meet his eyes. He vaguely remembered doing that, once before...abruptly, he recalled something else from that day. Chakotay said nonchalantly, "I took a holorecording of Earhart and Noonan's plane."

Kathryn stared at him. "Could we recreate her Electra...?" Just then, her communicator chirped.

"Torres to Janeway. The coolant system is back online, Captain. We can go to warp at any time."

"I'm on my way to the bridge." The captain rolled her eyes, disconnecting. "Damn."

"Later?"

"Got any plans when you get off duty this evening?"

"I guess I do now. Do you know how to fly a biplane, Kathryn?"

"I guess I'm going to learn. With the safeties on," she admonished, wagging a finger at him. He grinned as he followed her.


	2. Twin Engines

"I can't decide whether I like the way her story ends."

Kathryn was up to her elbows in grease, struggling with a piece of twisted metal from one of the propellers. A pair of old-fashioned flight goggles held her hair back from her face, though one strand had broken loose and was sticking to her cheek. He watched her sit back, start to wipe her forehead, then realize that her arms were too dirty to think about it. She picked up the brown leather jacket, a replica of Earhart's which Chakotay had tossed to her when she arrived on the holodeck that evening, and buried her face in the lining for a moment.

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"Earhart was one of my favorite historical figures. I even had a hologram of her." Chakotay tried and failed to bite back a grin, but she echoed it, despite the blush on her already rosy cheeks. "You might be happy to know that she told me to get off the holodeck and make more friends."

"Sounds like a good influence. Did the real thing live up to your expectations?"

"Very much so. Just as smart and tough and open-minded as I'd hoped." Kathryn paused to stick her head inside the plane, digging around for a tool. "I'll admit to being a little disappointed that she chose to remain on the planet."

"You mean you were disappointed personally, or you didn't approve of her choice?"

"A little of both, I guess. I'd hoped she'd come with us."

"I guess exploring on a planetary scale was enough for her. She probably never dreamed of exploring the cosmos, in 20th century Earth."

"Do you ever find yourself wishing that the crew had decided they wanted to stay?"

All the time, Kathryn. He bit back the words, turning away so that she couldn't see his face if she decided to look up from her task. If the crew had wanted to stay, they'd have been stuck there, too. They could have made a home. Or else they would have had to make their way alone--taken a shuttle, like they were hoping to do if she found a cure for the virus on New Earth--another fantasy he sometimes replayed, that they'd been gone from that planet before Voyager got back to retrieve them, had lived out their lives traveling the galaxy together...

"Occasionally," he said.

"It seemed harder to make the decision at the time than it does now. Now, I can't believe I ever considered wanting to just stop there." Kathryn's tone denoted agreement. She had never made a similar offer to the crew at any of the other planets they'd stopped at - never asked whether anyone wanted to remain behind. He suspected it was because she was afraid that, as time went on, there would be takers. Not that he faulted the decision - the colony of humans had been a special case, and crewmembers were always free to petition to stay behind. So far, none had.

"Why were you disappointed about Earhart?" he pressed.

"I never liked any of the suppositions about what happened to her." She put down what she was working on and walked over to where he bent over the charred metal on the side of the plane. "You know. Drowned in the Pacific, captured by the Japanese, changing her name and living incognito after a spy mission. When I was a lot younger, I thought there was some romance to the idea that maybe she and Noonan ran off together, but as I grew up, I thought that would have been irresponsible."

"How do you know they didn't?" he teased.

"She was married, for one thing. So was he. He wrote letters to his wife about the flight." Kathryn paused, hand on the side of the plane. "Not that her being married necessarily meant there was no extracurricular activity on that trip. Did you know she wrote her husband a letter before their wedding, saying she would not hold him to any medieval code of faithfulness, nor would she consider herself so bound? She wanted him to promise to let her go after a year if they made each other miserable."

Chakotay knew little about Earhart, other than what he'd looked up in the past couple of days. Her legend was more interesting than her life--she couldn't possibly have been all the things her reputation suggested. Pilot. Patriot. Romantic daredevil. Feminist pioneer. Spy for one side or the other. Cunning wife of a cunning businessman, or his victim. "The idea that Earhart might have died at sea of her own incompetence seems to have been intolerable to biographers," he noted.

"Mmm-hmm. So they had her playing hide and seek with the Coast Guard, crashing her plane into the ocean to evade capture, dying of a Japanese gunshot for refusing to reveal her secrets."

"Disappearing with her navigator in the South Seas."

"Or abandoning him for secret passage home to live under an assumed name, to protect her privacy," Janeway chided, but her eyes were focused somewhere in the distance, frowning at a larger problem. "As long as she was missing, she could have been whatever sort of heroine anyone wanted her to be."

"Is that what you don't like about the ending?"

"Maybe." He was a little surprised that Kathryn, the scientist, wasn't pleased to have closure to the story.

****

In the previous weeks, Kathryn had run some flight simulations in the Electra, wrecking a couple of holographic planes on takeoffs and landings. She'd even gotten Paris to come practice with her, and then had to wrestle the controls away from him. He wanted to recreate the flight around the world with them - the plane was big enough for three - but the captain had insisted he was needed on the bridge during the thirty-hour stretch when she and Chakotay would be over the South Pacific. "You're a lucky man," Tom said to Chakotay one night in the mess hall while the latter was studying a star chart over dinner, and Chakotay hadn't argued. He was lucky Kathryn wanted to do this, was willing to take him with her, was willing to ignore Tuvok's raised eyebrow at the number of hours the captain and first officer would miss on the bridge. Historical research, she called it.

One afternoon they had a quarrel. Kathryn was halfheartedly complaining about having to pilot without state-of-the-art equipment, and he'd laughed, made an offhand remark about a pilot having to have a feel for the plane. Told her jokingly to loosen up and she'd enjoy it more. She'd glared, informed him that if he didn't trust her piloting skills then, like Earhart did with Henry Manning, she'd find someone else to fly with. Chakotay left the holodeck in a black mood, and for the rest of the afternoon, he was terrified that Janeway would boot him off the flight and invite Paris instead. He'd half-suspected she would try to back out before the flight, anyway. Most of the times they'd made any personal plans in the past, something had come up which left her feeling uncomfortable with him, so that she slammed the command barrier back in place. They'd spent a couple of quiet evenings on Lake George together, but she seemed most comfortable alone, or with holograms. He knew his teasing made her feel exposed, and that she would probably feel safer with Tom, who would never point out her insecurities to her.

But Tom didn't press to go, and Chakotay got the distinct impression that the younger man might have said something to Kathryn to get her first officer back into her good graces. "He doesn't like to see us argue," she reported wryly. "It's so important that we present a united front for the crew, and never do anything which could jeopardize that." Chakotay bit back a comment about how he wasn't the one who set up a spy plot using a senior officer as the dupe. No point in bringing up two-year-old injuries. Kathryn had changed since then--she wouldn't try to use him that way now. But she was also less open with him now than then about non-command matters. Some line had been crossed on New Earth which she was unwilling to press.

"Maybe Earhart and her husband really were miserable," he mused. "Even if things seemed peaceful. That could be why she wanted to fly around the world. To get away."

"Could be. Her husband funded the expedition." Furrowing her brow, Kathryn contemplated the plane again, reaching a hand to inspect the patchwork Chakotay had just completed. "Did you read the Doctor's report on Noonan's injury?"

"No."

"Noonan thought he was dying. He confessed that he loved her."

Kathryn sounded embarrassed. Chakotay laughed incredulously. "The Doc put that in his report?"

"He took it as evidence of Noonan's drunkenness." He tried to picture the wounded navigator making such a confession to the legendary heroine--though to him, she wasn't a legend. She could have been a heroine, but she was also the woman he took orders from. Chakotay grinned at that thought, and Kathryn smiled, almost shyly, as if she knew what he was thinking. "Deathbed confessions have to be taken with a grain of salt, anyway. People don't tend to be thinking all that clearly."

"On the contrary. Deathbed confessions are the kind you can never take back, so they're probably the most honest sort. Do you know how Tom and B'Elanna finally got together?"

"Bat'leth practice?"

"Sort of. She told me she admitted everything to him when they were floating in space with no air left."

"She might have been lightheaded."

"She wasn't."

"Well, that one didn't surprise me at all. Fred Noonan surprised me more. I never really believed the historical speculation about him and Amelia. I think I always assumed they went down screaming at each other."

"Why would they have been screaming?"

"Blaming each other for not finding Howland Island. He reportedly had a drinking problem, though there's no evidence he was drinking on the flight. Her father was an alcoholic so it's unlikely she would have tolerated it. And she wasn't as accurate a pilot as her legend holds her to be. They flew hundreds of miles off course over Africa because she didn't listen to one of his directions."

"Why is she still reputed to be the greatest woman pilot in history?"

"Because she disappeared. Left behind a mystery."

He stood, wiping his hands on his work pants. They had come to the holodeck in casual clothes, and he had surprised her with replicas of Earhart's jacket and goggles; he didn't think anything of Noonan's would have fit him. With her hair slicked back, Kathryn almost resembled the famous aviator. The similarities again made him smile, and he crossed his arms, challenging.

"Think people back home wonder about us like that?"

She arched an eyebrow. "I doubt they think we ran off together."

"You never know. Starfleet captain and Maquis renegade...it would make a good holonovel."

"Not my thing, though. I didn't want Earhart to have been an ordinary woman who threw it all away on ordinary ambition, or love."

There's nothing ordinary about love, he thought. Aloud he said, "There's nothing ordinary about being the first woman to fly around the world."

"And we're going to finish her trip."

****

As soon as he'd shown her the Electra, that had been her plan. Dig out some recordings of Earth from Earhart's era - well, a little later, the earliest global scans were from some thirty years later when manned spaceflight was becoming commonplace. Program the holodeck so that they would take off from Miami and recreate Earhart's last flight--South to Brazil, across the Atlantic to Africa, over the Middle East to India, through Southeast Asia to New Guinea, then East to Howland Island.

Earhart and Noonan never reached Howland. They must have gotten close, their final transmission to the Coast Guard was fairly clear--Kathryn had found it in the computer library and played it for him. Earhart had sounded concerned, but not panicked. The prevailing theory on their disappearance--that they had been traveling too far North due to a storm which prevented Noonan from navigating accurately, and had had to set down at sea in rough waters which quickly sank the plane--had been superseded by Earhart's report on what happened to her plane when the Briori abducted them, but all the risks of the initial flight would still exist; they would have to contend with brewing storms, a faulty radio, a possible Japanese attack, low fuel, and whatever else the computer simulation chose to throw at them.

It took several weeks of preparation, some of it strenuous, sweating together on the overheated holodeck. She seemed to enjoy the workout, and he enjoyed watching her, pink-cheeked and intense as she cajoled the equipment to cooperate with her plans. He studied the Electra's equipment; the ancient chronometer and navigation tools were outdated even in Noonan's era. Earhart's navigator had had bad experiences with failed direction finders, preferring to navigate by the stars and sun lines. Chakotay and Janeway both knew Morse code, but Earhart and Noonan had not; they'd left their telegraph key and trailing antenna behind, and ditched their parachutes before setting across the Pacific.

Chakotay was going to have to do this the old-fashioned way.

"I'm a better pilot than a navigator," he warned Kathryn.

"Tough. I'm flying."

Their planned takeoff was disrupted by a problem which necessitated that the crew shut down the holodeck for almost a week. While the computer processor was missing, the gelpacks had received energy erratically; some of them were still not functioning optimally, almost as if they were sluggish. Janeway reassigned much of the crew to engineering and spent a lot of time down there herself, working on the energy flow problems with B'Elanna and apparently rather enjoying herself. Much as he resisted the idea of her leading dangerous away missions, Chakotay couldn't help noticing that she was much happier away from the bridge. Her interactions with the crew changed, too; she became one more officer working on a problem, much less The Captain.

Ultimately, Torres concluded that taking the ship out of warp, shutting down all power to nonessential parts of the ship, and bringing all the gelpacks back online together might stabilize them, so they sought out a region of space which seemed devoid of any potentially hostile or even interested lifeforms. One planet was there, a lush green world with plentiful fruits and vegetables, no animals larger than small primates. Chakotay wondered when Earth had stopped being his point of comparison, when that other Earth became the paradise against which all other places were evaluated.

He and Kathryn were never on the surface at the same time: they took turns leading away teams, his concerned with foraging for food supplies while hers tracked down important raw metals. It was a wonderful diversion for the crew on a week when the usual diversions were unavailable, and when they jump-started the engines, everything seemed to be working normally. "Maybe they just wanted a break from the routine," Kathryn joked at the end of a briefing. She hadn't really gotten enough sleep while the engine problems were being solved, but she still seemed to be in a better mood than she had several weeks earlier. It certainly seemed to Chakotay like a good time to take off on a side mission.


	3. Safety Protocols

It wasn't really like being on a round-the-world flight, of course. Instead of dining together on foreign delicacies and retreating to strange rooms at the end of each leg of the journey, they went to the bridge and the mess hall, returned to their regular roles and duties. They encountered no unexpected delays, never fought about accommodations or sightseeing plans. It would have been less historically accurate, but it might have been more interesting if they had programmed random elements into the early part of the flight recreation--some menace which could have brought the plane down, or misdirected them.

At first they tried to act as they thought Earhart and Noonan would have, with Kathryn sitting in the pilot's seat and Chakotay in the cabin, passing notes to her by way of a fishing pole with a basket attached. But they got bored with that quickly, and he moved to the copilot's seat, where he could see her face over the long miles of simulated travel.

"Which ending to the Earhart legend would you have liked?" she asked him.

"I like the one they got," he admitted. "I'm not sure anyone could have lived up to the expectations Earhart would have created if she succeeded on her round-the-world flight. What do you do for an encore?"

"Write a book and tour," Kathryn said cheerfully.

"Is that what you're going to do after you bring Voyager in?"

"Very funny." She sobered. "I don't think about it very much. I've found that when people start focusing on what comes after the goal, they sometimes lose sight of the goal itself."

"My people have a saying about the journey and not the destination being what matters."

At that, she laughed. "Your people seem to have a pithy saying for every point you want to make. Why, what do you want to do after we get back?"

"I have no idea. It seems a long way off."

Whither thou goest wasn't one of his people's sayings.

****

The turbulence when they left Brazil was so realistic that Chakotay got a little airsick. Kathryn teased him, reminding him that there was nowhere to set down until they'd crossed the Atlantic, but he thought she was also a little annoyed. He reminded her gently that she'd crashed the plane repeatedly in flight simulations, and grumbled a little about her holding other people to standards of perfectionism which even she couldn't achieve, until she sent him to the cabin to study a map. Skies were mostly clear once they cleared the storm, and she put the plane on automatic pilot for awhile, taking her hand off the stick.

"Amelia did that," she told Chakotay, who raised an eyebrow at her relaxed posture. He pulled out a small silver flask. Kathryn made a face. "You're not getting a little too into the part, are you, Fred?"

"It's water." He grinned at her. They both had to speak a little too loudly to be heard over the noise of the plane; the Electra was loud, and cold air leaked in through the cracks around the windows. "Are we going to try to recreate everything precisely? Because if we are, I want a peanut butter sandwich."

"We should do this again sometime without any pre-set expectations." She looked out the window at the darkening sky. "How many times did you run 'Insurrection Alpha' before you told me about the program?"

"Just once. It felt strange taking orders from myself." It hadn't been just that; he'd been acutely uncomfortable with the version of himself in the program. A little too much macho posturing, a little too much swagger. He hadn't liked it at all when the holographic version of himself put his hands on his shoulders and grinned in his face.

"You took the side of the mutineers, then."

"Of course. I figured that was a lot more likely to give me some insight into who wrote the thing." They both grinned wryly. "I must say that Tuvok never occurred to me as a suspect."

"Who did you suspect?"

"You."

"Me!"

He had wanted to suspect her, though he knew better. Who would have given him that swagger, he asked himself? Not B'Elanna, not Tom, not Neelix, not Harry, not any of his former Maquis crewmates. He'd thought at first that the program must have been created by someone with a crush on him and a grudge against Janeway--he'd actually thought of Seska once he found her in the program. The early mutiny scenario, the scheme which she denounced in her own rewriting of it, had reminded him of the Seska he'd known--cunning, but not ruthless. The extent of her viciousness had shocked him. She'd been kinder to the crew when she helped the Kazon take Voyager than she was to Tuvok in her reprogramming.

Chakotay was genuinely stunned to learn that the Vulcan Chief of Security had written the scenario. In a way, it pleased him--so Tuvok didn't think Janeway was perfect or impervious to deception, after all. Chakotay hadn't known whether to be outraged or flattered that Tuvok thought the first officer would or could take over the ship; he'd been quite disturbed that Tuvok thought he'd destroy Janeway's shuttle if she caught him at it. At least she hadn't been on the shuttle. And Janeway had fought back well, he'd had a great time chasing her through the corridors. He tried flirting with her, too, but she shot that down with her standard glare that could melt steel, more effective than a slap in the face.

"You came across OK in that simulation," he told her.

"I had my ship taken by mutineers!"

"I bet you were going to get it back. How many times did YOU play 'Insurrection Alpha'?"

Kathryn looked straight out the window. "A couple."

"Which side?"

"The first time, I tried to oppose you. With some success, though I cheated and used command-level overrides to stop the lockdown on crew quarters. You put me in solitary confinement. It got boring. I started it over and took your side."

"And?"

"I was...uncomfortable."

"Leading a mutiny against yourself?"

"Not just that. Chakotay, did you notice that Tuvok had you practically seducing people to your side?" He blinked. "Your holo-image was very caring and devoted to the crew. You kept stopping to see how I was doing. You went out of your way to make me feel special. I'm not sure how much of it was just the mantle of authority from being in command...but I'm supposed to be immune to that..."

Chakotay shut his eyes in embarrassment. "I don't believe it. The simulation had me coming on to ensigns to recruit them to my cause?"

"I guess Tuvok thinks you're a real charmer." She drawled out the Vulcan's name in a way that got his attention.

"Using my sex appeal to get my way? Did it work with you?"

"I'll never tell." His heart sped up. Kathryn had a tiny, saucy grin, but she wasn't looking at him. "I would have thrown you in the brig and tossed away the key if I'd caught you."

"You wouldn't have had to catch me, I'd have conceded defeat and given you back your ship. Would you have visited me in the brig?"

"I'm sure I would have." She cocked her head to the instruments. "Did you ever really think about trying to take the ship?"

"No. Absolutely not, never. I'm surprised you'd ask."

"The thought must have crossed your mind."

"Seska and Jarv...uh, another Maquis suggested it, the first week. I told them I'd throw them in the brig if I heard another word about it."

"That couldn't have made you very popular with your former crew."

"It didn't matter in a couple of days. No one wanted to take you out of the chair once they started serving under you, Kathryn."

"Other than Seska."

"She was never serving under you. She was never ever serving under me."

Kathryn sat back at something in his tone. "That must have hurt you a great deal." Commander, he heard her say, though she didn't quite say it.

It was a professional question as much as a personal observation. "Yes. And no. I had so many other things on my mind."

"And the baby?"

"I was greatly relieved to find out it wasn't mine." Seska's baby would have been the end of his relationship with Kathryn. He had gone after it, out of guilt, out of duty, out of a lurking sense that Kathryn thought he should--that she did not want him to be the kind of man who would abandon his own child, no matter the circumstances of its conception. But if he'd brought it on board, raised it, spent his free time with it, a constant reminder of the mistakes he'd made with Seska both before he met Kathryn and afterwards, it would have killed the only thing he had really wanted. The fantasy which put him to sleep at night: that someday he and she would be alone together as they had been on New Earth. Maybe not that completely alone. But without the huge, tangled complications of their roles and their pasts, the things which forever came between them. A desert island.

"Do you want children?" Her voice brought him back to the present.

"Maybe someday. You?"

"At the right time, with the right person, yes. I would like to have a child."

"She didn't."

"Who?"

"Amelia Earhart. She talked about not wanting children."

"Maybe that was why she resisted marriage so much. In her era, they usually went together."

"Is that why you and Mark never got married?"

She was silent for a long time. "We never seriously discussed children," she said after awhile. "It was always something that was a long way off."

"She said she wanted to go down with her plane. To die quickly."

"I know."

"Kathryn, if you had your life to live over again, knowing what you know, would you accept the mission to come after my ship?"

There was a long, long silence. Chakotay wondered whether it was because she was pondering the answer, or because she knew the answer but didn't want to tell him.

"Yes," she answered finally. "You should get some sleep. We have to go straight to a bridge shift after we land in Dakar." End of subject.

****

When they were supposed to be over the Middle East, a moderate shipwide disaster struck. A trip through a small nebula disrupted the newly-revitalized gelpacks, and power fluctuations began to occur all over the ship. Their first indication of trouble was a mountain range superimposed over the desert: they thought it was a programming glitch, but then the lighting began to flicker and the ship shook. When they terminated the program, the holodeck would not initially show them the arch. Kathryn had taken a communicator, hidden in one of the pockets of Amelia's jacket, so they were able to contact the crew. Once they had the doors open, she ordered Chakotay to the bridge and headed off to engineering herself. She and Seven worked in one of the Jeffries tubes while B'Elanna and Harry rerouted plasma from the warp core, cooling the system. Chakotay was edgy on the bridge, bored almost; he wanted to be in the action.

Often they worked best, he mused, when they were not in the same room. Their styles were complementary, not cohesive; some of the most interesting conversations they had were over communicators, while they were working at opposite ends of a problem. Kathryn was much more skilled than he was at keeping her personal feelings separate from her instincts as an officer...though there was a price for that, for all the effort and practice she put into that distance. Seventy years. Could anyone hold aloof for that long? Did she ever stop to think that maybe they wouldn't get back to Earth in some measurable sum of time?

She was almost reluctant to come back to the holodeck once the crisis was averted, having reverted behind her wall of red and black, accentuated with gold pips. He had to persuade her, with some help from Tuvok who noticed how tired she looked. Kathryn rarely admitted to being tired. Staying up all night piloting across the desert was hardly likely to remedy that situation immediately, but Chakotay suspected that she'd sleep better with a break from routine. They camped one night in Assab, and spent a day in Karachi eating everything Kathryn could get her hands on.

****

Most of the mid-flight was uneventful, even the near-crash during takeoff in Calcutta when the sluggish runway nearly sent them careening into the trees. Even though they both knew it was coming and the safeties were on, they had an argument afterwards, with him chiding her for not going with the feel of the runway and Kathryn retorting that he wouldn't have done any better. He'd thought about taking the Electra out for a spin, one night when she was busy on the bridge and he had the holodeck to himself, but that would have been a mutiny of a sort. He might have discovered that she really was a better pilot than himself. Or he might have learned the opposite--that he could fly it just as well as she could, that her wings weren't any bigger than his own. He was in no position to lecture her about resigning oneself to one's limitations.

Personally, Chakotay had come to suspect that Amelia Earhart had a death wish. Not that she wanted to end her life, but that she was so afraid of confinement on the one hand and failure on the other that dying didn't seem so frightening. She tried things she wasn't ready for, but it took her years to marry a man she seemed to have loved, for fear the marriage wouldn't work. Reminded him a lot of someone he knew, and that made him nervous - a woman who'd remain on a planet to study a hologram of Leonardo Da Vinci, but who had taken three years to invite her first officer into one of her holographic scenarios. Physically brave, but not emotionally.

Kathryn had programmed interaction with the locals during some of the shorter hops, so they spent an afternoon sightseeing in Singapore, until Tuvok interrupted to notify them of a dark-matter nebula which sent them racing to Voyager's bridge. Despite the occasional variable, glitches which got through despite the programming and the safeties, the first 20,000 miles of their flight around the world went pretty much as scheduled. They avoided discussing both work and anything too personal, though they did manage to have a good time playing archaic card games and reading history texts aloud to one another.

"What are we going to do for an encore, Amelia?" he asked her jokingly in Lae while they were preparing for takeoff.

"Gee, Fred. Go home to a tickertape parade?"

"Sounds boring. Maybe we should let the Briori abduct us."

"We know how that version ends. That's even more boring. We could program in all the other endings. Crashing on the Pacific, abduction by the Japanese, living in Saipan, moving back to California under assumed names...we don't know what's going to happen, you know. I didn't program any guarantees that we would hit Howland."

"But I bet we will."

"You could always navigate wrong and steer me off course. They think Amelia was, you know--her transmissions were short and full of static, like she was flying in a storm. But the only storm was miles north of where they were supposed to be."

"If they flew in a storm all night, he couldn't have navigated by the stars."

"I wasn't accusing him of anything, Chakotay. We know she didn't always listen to him anyway." She grinned unexpectedly. "Maybe he should have tried telling her that his people had a saying..."

He swatted at her playfully, and stumbled when she ducked to avoid him, twisting his ankle. He bent over grimacing, and she was beside him in an instant, arm around his waist to support his weight, free hand on his chest to keep him upright. "You all right?"

"Yah," he gasped, the pain still smarting. She held on to him while he panted through it, so when it faded enough for him to lift his head, their faces nearly bumped. He didn't budge, and neither did she.

"Ever get that feeling of deja vu?" she whispered.

"All the time," he whispered back, conspiratorially.

It wouldn't have been a complicated matter to kiss her then. Lean over and do it fast, turn away quickly, she would have forgiven him--might even have been anticipating it. But his personal set of safety protocols kicked in, and he hobbled away from her.

The first sixteen hours of the flight toward Howland were calm, relaxing even. There was too much cloud cover to navigate much of the night, but they had anticipated that; he knew Noonan had been able to take a sun line reading, and kept them slightly to the south, safe from the storm to the north. Of course, by the time he could see the sun, astral navigation would be impossible. "It's been speculated that when she knew she was running out of fuel, Earhart tried to land in the Gilberts," Kathryn reminded him as she made one of many broadcasts: "KHAQQ calling Itasca..."

At 2:45 a.m., they made voice contact with the Itasca. The weather report from Howland was clear, though it remained overcast in their area. "Amelia couldn't have spied on the Japanese if she wanted to in this weather," Kathryn grumbled. She was tired; the 2,600-mile trip did not afford her any opportunity to sleep. The storm north of Howland had been reported to be fierce--snow, sleet, rain, lightning, with cloud tops over 18,000 feet. They would not be able to climb above it, and if they had to ditch, the waves beneath would destroy the plane. Chakotay had no intention of letting them anywhere near such weather.

****

But the effect of wind, often variable on a plane over water, proved hard to determine. The storm was not where it was supposed to be. Or else they were not.

"This is worse than South America!" Kathryn shouted over the engines and the thunder. It was true; fortunately neither of them had eaten anything for hours. She was fighting hard just to hold the stick steady as the wings bucked in the wind. After a moment's debate with himself, he put his hand on top of hers to hold it steady, afraid she would think he was patronizing, but she seemed glad to have it there. Besides, he realized a moment later, she wasn't blaming herself for this unexpected disaster. "How did you put us so far off-course?" she demanded.

"I didn't," he barked, glad for the wind as an excuse to holler. "Not every problem that comes up is because of something I overlooked. You can't predict the weather. Try to head us south."

"This isn't what the weather's supposed to be!" The plane dropped precipitously, and she grunted as she attempted to swing around. "I thought we were following their flight path!"

"We don't know their entire path over the Pacific, Kathryn, we're not sure exactly where they were when they were abducted. She said the light was behind them...South! You're going in the wrong direction."

"The wind isn't giving me much of a choice! I'm trying to maneuver..."

The plane jolted so hard that his head slammed into the console in front of him. He felt a sharp pain start to shoot through through his skull, then stop: a feeling like passing through a transporter as the matter desolidified, the safeties coming on. He would have had a concussion. He suspected that the shriek next to him had been from Kathryn flying chest-first against the steering column, but there had been another sound, a crack. Not his skull, not her ribs, the holodeck wouldn't allow it. One more pop, and he knew what it was.

"We lost an engine?" he asked, rubbing his head.

"Chakotay, I'm going to have to try to set down on the water..." Her voice was angry. "Goddamn it! Why didn't we put the life raft back on, if we were deviating from their flight? And the antenna..."

"It's too late for that!" he yelled over the wind, as the plane lurched heavily to one side. "We're not far past the Gilberts. Maybe we can hit them. Or one of the reefs..."

"Shit." The word was whispered fiercely, almost lost in the wind, and so uncharacteristic of Kathryn Janeway that he burst out laughing in spite of the situation. They were in a steep nosedive, both their hands clutching the stick white-knuckled. They watched the altimeter circle downward, as they were spiraling downward, listing to the side where the engine lay idle. "Well, see you on the floor of the holodeck," she quipped, but her lips were pressed tightly together in frustration. Nothing to do, no way to fight this. She was going to define this as failure, for Amelia and for herself.

"Maybe I did put us too far north," he conceded. "The effect of the wind is hard to calculate over the ocean...and the chronometers might have been off...maybe it's later than I thought..."

Something appeared out the front of the cockpit, browner and greener than the churning waves. They both saw it at the same time. "Is it..."

"Can we hit it?" They were both frantically in motion, leaning westward toward the tiny speck of land, as she jerked the controls with all her power. A random holodeck variation, some glitch they had inadvertently permitted to slip into the programming, or an extrapolation on what actually would have happened if this were really the Pacific? They wouldn't know till afterwards. "Get her down in one piece, Amelia," he said as the plane began to shake uncontrollably, and heard her answer:

"Just tell me where, Fred."


	4. Desert Island

"Did you ever play that game, with music? If you could only take five pieces of music with you to a desert island, which would they be?"

"Brahms," Kathryn said promptly. "And something Baroque. Only five pieces? Not artists' library chips?"

"Five songs. Or symphonies. No collected masterworks." He picked up a handful of sand. "Where do we think the Coast Guard is?"

"Maybe they're looking for us out at sea." She shaded her eyes with a hand, not really necessary given the overcast sky, and looked toward the westward horizon. "Can we repair the plane without them?"

"We can probably fix the coil. The problem is that we can't refuel."

"Well, I hope they find us soon. I'm starving."

"I bet I can find us something edible. You picked a good crash site, this is a much nicer island than Howland. There aren't fruit trees there."

"There's bat guano."

"Yum." He started toward the trees, considered bringing the flashlight, but they would need that much more when night fell...if Kathryn planned for them to stick it out on the holodeck that long. "Ow!" He felt a sting on his neck, slapped it, pulled his hand away to find a large half-crumpled mosquito.

"Bug bite?"

"Uh-huh. Ever get that feeling of deja vu?"

She came toward him with her arms crossed and head lowered, looking just a tad suspicious. "This better not turn out to be a plasma storm."

"Not in this part of the South Pacific. Come on, we should gather more wood."

It had rained recently, so there was plenty of fresh water collected in little pools, which they caught in an empty bottle and boiled. They were lucky to find enough dry material to start a fire, but it wasn't producing enough smoke that the coast guard was likely to pick it up. Or, if they were, then so were any Japanese scout ships in the area, and given the computer's creativity in using the programming parameters to create this scenario, he wasn't at all sure that a hostile fleet wasn't coming next.

He found some fruit to smoke for her while she splashed water on her face. "I could try to make you a bathtub out of one of the empty fuel tanks," he joked. She straightened slowly, looking out at sea.

"Chakotay...did you program this?"

"Of course not." He didn't know whether to laugh or get annoyed.

"Of course not," she echoed. "You're not this subtle. If you wanted to relive New Earth, you would have programmed that."

She probably didn't mean to be mocking him, just stating a fact, but the words stung. "Nothing subtle about me," he agreed, listening to the juices sizzle as he turned a skewer of banana, coconut, and something green and mushy that tasted sweet but he didn't quite recognize. "Tell you what, if you want to relive New Earth, you go ahead, and pretend I'm the monkey." He squatted by the fire for another minute, sweating, then rose and silently handed her the skewer before circling the damaged plane.

After a long time, she said quietly but unmistakably, "We can't ever get back there, Chakotay. We can only go on."

"I've never tried to get back there. Not even here." He gestured at the ceiling of the holodeck, disguised by clouds. "I keep hoping we can move forward, though, not just go on. Not act like it didn't happen."

"It doesn't have a lot to do with our lives now."

"No?"

"We're not planting vegetables and coming up with art projects so we don't get bored."

"Were you bored on New Earth?" He came around to her side of the plane, away from the water. She handed him the flashlight and indicated where she wanted him to shine it. They were very close together beside one of the engines, his body cornering hers. "I wasn't bored," he added. "I wasn't building things just to keep busy, they mattered to me. You didn't seem bored either, not when you were doing your research and not afterwards either. You were happy."

"I wasn't captain of a starship."

"Is that all you ever want to be, that title? Captain Janeway? Like a uniform you never take off? You're not wearing it right now."

"I am wearing it. You just can't see it."

"Oh yeah? Show me." He tilted the light a little in her direction, though he could see perfectly well in the diffused daylight. She was, in fact, wearing a decidedly non-regulation short-sleeved shirt rolled up even further, tied high around the waist, and a pair of very battered slacks, also rolled up, no shoes. Her cheeks were bright pink, streaked with sweat and soot. He shouldn't have looked, because it was too obvious what looking did to him. He watched her watch him react to her.

"What do you miss?" she asked.

"What?"

"About New Earth."

"Working with my hands. Breathing non-recycled air. Not living on a timetable. Fresh food. Swimming in a river." Seeing you first thing in the morning, last thing before I went to bed.

"You could have most of that in here."

"It's not the same."

"No, it's better. You could have all of that in here, and still play hoverball with B'Elanna when you wanted company."

And when you wanted company, he thought, you could just change the program. He had a sudden flash of realization about why she wasn't lonely on New Earth; he'd expected her to be depressed, stranded without anyone but himself, but other than the expected unhappiness at not being able to complete her mission and the refusal to admit that they might live their entire lives on that planet without any hope of escape, she'd been mostly upbeat, grousing but not moping. She didn't really have fewer friends there than here, however, given the distance that she forced herself to keep from the crew. In fact, it might have been easier for her to deal with physical exile than the self-imposed ostracism she suffered on Voyager.

"I had company," he reminded her.

"I couldn't have been very good company. I was so busy. I miss that...I don't get to do as much hands-on research here."

"What else do you miss?"

"Working like this, believe it or not. That was a surprise. I liked roughing it. I could forget all about life off the holodeck on an afternoon like this. Of course, tonight I might feel differently, if we're still stuck here."

"I'll cook seafood for you."

"Isn't that meat?"

"I don't have any objections to cooking holographic fish. I won't eat it though. The last time I ate meat of necessity on an away team, it made me sick."

"I miss getting to eat your cooking more often. And I miss the bathtub."

"Haven't you got one in your quarters?"

"It's not under the stars. I miss talking to you in the bath."

"You could always...never mind, I'm not going to touch that one." He smiled at the growing warmth between them. Sweating together as they worked on the plane, comfortable with their bodies around one another. "Did Q really serenade you?"

"He certainly did. He's lucky he's immortal, or he'd be dead now." Her expression was more amused than appalled. "I was afraid to be naked for days. I kept expecting him to pop up at the most embarrassing moments. But in an odd way, he really acted like a gentleman. I don't think he would have tried to force me to do anything...how did you hear about the bath?" she demanded suddenly?

"He told Tom and Harry."

"And they told you? Why?"

"I have no idea." That, of course, was not true. They'd been worried about her, but they'd also been worried about him - his anxiety must have been obvious to everyone. Kathryn had downplayed her feelings in front of Q, which might have meant that she didn't share his, but also might have indicated that she was trying to protect him. And Q had not pushed, because he hadn't required her to be in love with him - he wanted a mother, not a lover. Once Chakotay understood that, he'd felt slightly better about the situation, even when Q abducted her. "Why didn't you put it in your report?" he asked, half-idly.

"I didn't think it was important. And I didn't want to upset you over nothing."

"It still upsets me, Kathryn."

"Still? After Riley Frasier?"

There was an awful lot he hadn't put into his report about that particular encounter, so he was surprised to hear her bring it up in such a context. They'd both avoided talking about Riley. Kathryn didn't know the extent of what had happened in the link, and afterwards...nor did she know that her first officer had personally invited Riley to accompany them on their journey to the Alpha Quadrant. Despite what she'd done to him subsequently, Chakotay couldn't help but be glad that Riley had declined the offer. No matter how intense the experience of what they had shared had been, it had also been momentary, and he'd have been stuck with her at his side forever, with Kathryn lost to him...

"'I know I have no right, but this bothers the hell out of me,'" she recited. Mockingly.

"Do you have something to say to me about Riley Frasier?"

"Other than what the hell were you thinking?" She stopped, sighed, and pulled her head out of the engine, looking at the wing. "I'm sorry. You couldn't have known what she would do."

"Is that what you're angry about? That they duped me--that she duped me?"

"I'm not angry." Her eyes closed momentarily and she moved a step back, from the plane and from him. "I was...it threw me for a loop, how two weeks before I thought we were so close, and then suddenly she was all that mattered." He opened his mouth to say that that was not true, and she silenced him with a look: "Don't deny it, you wouldn't even meet my eyes in the briefing room. You couldn't give me a straight answer to any of my questions. It was good, in a way--it made me remember why it was not a good idea for me to depend too much on you..."

"Hence your decision not to trust me when the Borg and Species 8472 came along." The words sounded more bitter than he intended. "How long do you intend to make me keep paying for that one mistake, Kathryn?"

"Which mistake? Riley, or evacuating live beings out an airlock, in direct violation of my orders?" She held up a hand before he could reply. "Never mind, I'm sorry I said that. I don't want to drag command disagreements into our recreation time."

"They're part of our lives. How can we talk about anything if we can't talk about those?" Silence. She bent back toward the engine. "We're still not going anywhere, Kathryn. Tell me what you want to say."

For several minutes he heard only her tools. "I thought...after Riley, I thought that we were finally past New Earth," she said finally. "We were friends, and it was comfortable. You didn't touch me, you didn't ask me to eat with you as often. I thought maybe it was a sign that you'd...stopped wanting something we can't ever have."

"'Ever' is a long time," he said. She ignored him.

"I won't pretend that that didn't give me a few sad moments of might-have-been, but it was also a relief. My job has to come first. I didn't want you distracting me from that any more than I wanted to feel responsible for distracting you from our mission."

"I'm not trying to distract you from our mission, Kathryn."

"You are. When you suggest to me that finding a nice planet to settle down on is a viable alternative to trying to pass through Borg space, you're keeping me and the rest of the crew from our primary goal."

"You don't know what the rest of the crew wants. You didn't ask them this time."

"I didn't need to. I'm the captain."

"There you go again. Kathryn, how are we supposed to not drag command disagreements into our entertainment when you say things like that?"

"Now you know why I don't usually invite you on my holodeck excursions. Don't get jumpy, listen to me," she added when he jolted back as though he'd been slapped in the face. "The only way I can escape from being the captain is not to have anyone from the crew with me. Anyone at all. The last time I pulled rank on you, you lectured me, disobeyed my expressed wishes, and barely spoke to me for weeks. That's not something I can risk on a regular basis." There was a sudden shake in her voice. "You can't have it both ways. You promise to stay by my side, doing everything you can to make my burden lighter, then you also want to be in control. You can't be the pilot and the navigator."

"Neither can you. Besides, you weren't letting me be either one."

"I wasn't sure who you were, after the Borg."

"Kathryn, I haven't changed. My feelings have not changed since New Earth. Riley was a symptom of that--I almost watched you die, I wasn't sure I could live with that, you reached out to me, and then a day later we were back to business as usual. I don't believe that things make so little impact on you. I think you're hiding, so you don't have to admit that you may have changed."

"I am not hiding." She stood up to face him, smudged with dirt from having her head pressed practically inside the engine. Despite her frown, he could not keep a grin from his lips as he looked at her--sweat smeared over her forehead like glue holding the hair away, sleeves shoved up around her shoulders, dry sand caking much of her lower body while wet mud squished under her feet. "Could you get the flashlight and shine it on these coils?" she demanded pointedly.

"Sure." He shifted beside her, trying not to get too close, but they were already too close. Heat between their bodies like an energy field, the tiny hairs on her upper arm contacting his, just enough to tickle. A series of concentric rings held one of the coils in place, growing smaller in size as they got closer to the casing. She began to tug them apart as she fought to reach the wire beneath.

"We'd better make sure we have time to shower before duty. We stink."

"Are you speaking of me?" he grinned.

"I can't smell you over myself. Here, hold these." She handed him one of the small metal bands, then another. He piled them on top of the engine, paused to look down at her. She glanced up at his inspection, then shook her head and returned her gaze to the engine.

"Do you want"--tug--"to tell me"--tug--"what's so funny?"

"You actually look good in mud. I'd forgotten." She stopped to rub her hand. "Want me to try to do that?"

"I don't think your fingers are small enough."

"They're not that much bigger than yours." Picking one of the rings back up, he slipped it experimentally onto his left third finger. It stuck on the knuckle and refused to budge. Her hands returned to the engine while he fought to work off the tight band, curling it into his palm. Not so big, he thought, leaning over toward her.

"Let me see."

"All right." She straightened, rubbing her back as she turned to him. He lifted her hand and pressed it against his, then realized at her stare that she had thought he planned to go straight for the machinery, not to compare the size of their fingers.

"See? There's not that much difference." He hesitated, enjoying the pressure of her palm against his, and an impulse siezed him. He pushed apart her fingers with his own and slid the band over her next-to-last digit, the ring finger, that was what humans called it, because in Western cultures it was the one on which people wore rings when they were...

She drew in a short, shocked breath as the significance of what he'd done hit them both simultaneously.

Laugh, he ordered himself. Make a joke out of it, you've covered so much territory already...he exhaled hard, not a laugh exactly. Kathryn's gaze shifted from her fingers to him. The sweat dried on his suddenly cold skin at the look, as she scolded, "I'm going to have to take this off to put the casing back together."

"I know." Even if she left it on, when they left the holodeck, the ring would disappear like the sky and the sea and the Electra. She just wanted to get the repairs done, wanted to play out the scenario, didn't want to make a scene, didn't want to have the discussion. Kathryn glanced back at him for a long moment--too long. Checking to see whether he was all right, so that he was painfully self-conscious, and had to say something just to make her look away.

"I'll replicate you another one if you want."

It worked; her eyes widened and turned elsewhere fast. She practically stuck her head inside the engine to get away. "Make sure you also replicate a copy of Amelia's escape clause," her slightly muffled voice floated back.

Something flared in him, molten and bright, momentarily wiping out the dark wave of pain which was slowly freezing his chest, even though he was supposed to be kidding and she was supposed to be kidding. "Of course," he said, half to himself. "Wouldn't want to try anything with the safeties off."

The holodeck lighting flickered violently. They both jumped. For a moment, he thought it had been lightning, and indeed the sky seemed darker, thunderclouds directly overhead where none had been a moment before. But the entire island had changed. The forest came almost to the edge of the water now, rough waves which sprayed against their legs and spattered the side of the Electra, which was far more damaged than it had appeared moments before. Kathryn stumbled back from the burned engine, bumping into him, so that they had to steady one another before abruptly pulling back.

"The computer must have thought that was an order," she said, straightening. "Look at this."

It was glorious. The air was alive with electricity, charged like a plasma storm on New Earth. For the first time, he felt like they were on a desert island. "It's wonderful," he whispered.

"Wonderful?"

"Anything could happen." He put a hand on her shoulder and turned her slowly towards him. "We can actually get somewhere. No pre-set parameters." She looked at him sharply at the word. "This is what it was like for Amelia and Fred, Kathryn, not a pre-set itinerary where they knew all the variables. Come on, let's..."

"No." Her voice and her eyes were implacable.

"But..."

"We're not taking risks like this. Computer. Safeties on."

"Wait a minute..." A slight flicker, and the sky was clear, the plane in a better state of repair. And a dot had appeared on the horizon.

"Well, there's the rescue party. Right on schedule." He knew his voice was bitter. "Congratulations."

"Thank god..." she was already saying, then turned at his tone. "You didn't honestly want to leave the safeties off?"

"Things sure were a lot more interesting for a minute. The one you couldn't wait to end." No going back. "I guess you're going to get to complete your flight."

"Isn't that the goal?" she demanded.

"To get home? Sure, Kathryn. I guess it makes sense to play it safe all the way." She stared at him, clasping her hands together in front of her as if she were about to make a speech, and he saw that she was still wearing the ring. He closed his eyes against the image.

Playing the same role, no matter where they went. Why couldn't he? Who had he turned into on this flight? Who had Fred and Amelia turned into, that he apparently fell in love with her when he had a bride at home and she had a husband who paid Noonan's bills? The coast guard would be able to repair the plane, they could complete the hop to Howland. Fly to Honolulu, then Oakland, a little off schedule for the Fourth of July but on target for their parade. Very heroic. Not nearly as interesting as the mystery, not as likely to inspire centuries of aviators perhaps, but what was expected in the grand style.

"Listen, I'm not feeling very well," he said; it was true. "I think maybe I should call it a day and get some rest before our bridge shifts. Duty before pleasure, you know?"

He tried a grin. She took a step toward him, he took a step back, like a waltz with no contact between the dancers. "Arch," he barked. Reality, a welcome intrusion this time, disrupted the lush green of the forest like the technology which had taken them away from their desert island.

"I'll see you in the morning, Captain," he said without looking back at the legendary aviator who had vanished with him into myth. And left.


	5. Salvage

Chakotay's door buzzed. He knew who it was. If he answered it, he was just going to give her what she wanted, whatever she wanted, whatever it cost him. Or else he was going to demand more for himself, and they were going to end up on worse terms than they were now. He considered not answering.

It was his own damn fault. For all the times he'd wanted to shake Kathryn when she announced that she was going on vacation on the holodeck, studying with Da Vinci, flirting with some character from an old novel, he'd gone and done the same thing. Pretended that what was happening was real. Believed that they were getting somewhere. No matter where you go, there you are. A pithy saying indeed, though he'd never thought about applying it to the holodeck before. Where had he thought she would take him on the holodeck, when they couldn't get there during thousands of miles of travel through the Delta Quadrant?

Kathryn didn't look any happier than he felt. She sat tight-lipped at his side on the bridge, staring through the viewport as if she didn't see the stars. Curious that she stayed out there, instead of in her ready room, where she usually retreated when there was a confrontation brewing with one of the senior staff. That way she could plot a course in private, and launch only when she was ready. Chakotay could feel Tuvok's eyes on the two of them, and could almost hear Tom's mind whirring, trying to think of something to say that would break the tension. Probably they were wondering what the captain and first officer were doing on the bridge. The ship was passing through a nearly-empty region of space; no inhabitable planets for several hundred light years, no known menaces, no raw materials they needed at present. The two of them could easily have taken the day off. Most of the crew knew about the holodeck excursion and didn't begrudge them the time; they all knew how hard the senior officers worked.

Wherever you go, there you are. That was not one of his people's sayings, but it had been one of his father's mottos. Unfortunately Kathryn did not seem to live in that present.

He was the first officer of this ship. She was the captain. He couldn't avoid her, couldn't refuse to mend their working relationship. Which he didn't have very many complaints with. The complaints were mostly personal. They were not about Captain Janeway. Except Captain Janeway believed that there was only Captain Janeway. He had no right to complaints against Kathryn. She had invited him on her flight, on her terms. To support her. To navigate. She never asked him to feel anything for her. Might even tell him to stop, if she could.

But there were some things even she couldn't order him to do.

"Come in," he called.

****

She came tentatively, stopping just inside the door and letting it shut behind her. She hadn't often been in his quarters. They saw so much of each other on duty, in her ready room and his office, on the bridge and in the briefing room, in the dining room and sickbay and engineering, on shuttles and at either end of transports, that it was rarely necessary for one of them to contact the other in their private rooms. They'd worked together occasionally in her sitting room, when he'd brought PADDs with new data after she'd left a duty shift, they'd even eaten at the low table by her couch, but he'd never seen her bedroom. And she'd mostly been in his quarters to check on him the few times when injury caused him to miss a duty shift, after the alien shoved his consciousness out of his body and after the Vori drugged him into fighting their war. Not after Riley. She looked rather out of place now. He wished it weren't so, and the wishing made him want to cry.

"What is is, Captain?"

She took a step forward, then stopped as it registered that he hadn't used her name. "I'd like you to come back with me to the holodeck."

"What for?"

"So we can finish the flight. I can't do it without you, Chakotay."

"I'm sure you could get one of those nice holographic navigators from the Coast Guard to finish it with you."

"I don't want to finish it with a nice holographic navigator. I want you."

The words hung between them for so long that he felt almost obligated to me a joke about them, but he didn't. It hurt too much. He watched her cross her arms, raise her chin defiantly, then realize that that might be the wrong approach. She relaxed a little, regarding the floor near his feet. Her eyes flickered back up."

"Tell me what I can say."

"How about 'please'?"

"Please." He didn't want to smile at her, but couldn't help it, then she was smiling back and his resistance began to fade. Chakotay cursed himself for a fool.

"What's in it for me?" he asked.

He expected her to say something about the satisfaction of witnessing the ending, or completing what he'd started, or maybe even something about the journey being what mattered and not the destination. He did not anticipate her answer:

"I thought maybe we could talk. With the safety protocols off."

The words worked on him like a command to the holodeck. He had to turn away from her and cover his face as the pain of the past days welled up in him--the past days, and the past years. She walked over and put a hand on his shoulder, trying to turn him, then rested it briefly against his back when he resisted.

"I'm sorry."

"So am I, Kathryn."

"Will you come?"

"Yes."

****

The coast guard crew was polite but quietly contemptuous. A few of them seemed to buy the myth of the legendary aviatrix, and suggested that his navigation must have been at fault for getting them so far off course, but he heard a number of remarks about women pilots and some pretty strong sailor language about Kathryn. She was a model of grateful efficiency as they repaired the plane, then took it south and west to Howland to refuel.

The captain of the Itasca offered to bunk them so they could get some sleep before they made the long flight to Honolulu, and in the interests of realism they almost accepted. But then Kathryn decided that some breaches with realism couldn't be helped. So they were back in the cockpit, flying over a calm Pacific towards the coastline of the United States.

"Do you know where your ancestors were living in this era?" she asked him.

"Mexico, New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, some of the Northern Plains states," he recited. His father had told him that he had proud Aztec heritage, but he knew from his mother that he was partly the product of the reservations, where the individuality of many of the tribes had been wiped out. "We're past the era when your ancestors would have been exterminating mine."

"My ancestors were mostly schoolteachers and scientists. Not too many officers until closer to our era. Although I guess everyone who settled in Indiana was an invader." She glanced over at him. "Do you still consider yourself Maquis, Chakotay?"

"I don't know. I'm not sure what that word means out here. I fought for my home. I'd fight for Voyager."

"What about Starfleet?"

"The institution? I don't know. I don't think I was ever devoted to it as an institution the way you are. If I were in command, I've had gotten rid of the uniforms a long time ago."

"And lost the sense of unity and purpose they convey."

"And let people keep what little individuality they have out here, away from their families and cultures. We could be on Voyager for a long time, Kathryn. I don't want to raise our kids in the culture and religion of Starfleet." She'd stiffened at the words "our kids." "All our children," he amended. "It's going to be very hard for Samantha Wildman to make her daughter feel like part of something separate from a starship. Have you noticed that people almost never wear casual clothes in the corridors? We look like a military vessel. That can't be good for the young people. They need to see more culture thriving on this ship."

"And when swarms of aliens attack? Our first order of business has to be to protect the lives of the crew, Chakotay. We need Starfleet discipline for that. This isn't a machine we can call the Coast Guard in to fix if it breaks down."

"What will you do if crewmembers eventually want to leave?"

"Cross that bridge when we come to it."

"What if it were me?"

Kathryn went very still. "What?"

"If I came to you and said, this planet we've been visiting, I feel very at home here, and I want to stay."

"I'd remind you of your obligation to this crew...the oath you swore..." Her knuckles were white on the controls.

"And if I told you that wasn't enough? I can't spend my entire life living in suspension, working for someone else's goal?"

"Then I'd beg you." Her voice was surprisingly flat and straightforward. "And I'd hate you for that. Would you stay?"

"I wouldn't want to leave in the first place. I had to ask. You said no safeties." She relaxed a little, but still wouldn't look at him. "You know how I feel about you, Kathryn." he added. Not a question. She nodded, eyes straight ahead. "How do you feel about that?"

"Conflicted." That was good--that was honest. "Some days it's very tense. Other days...it keeps me going."

"Why is it tense?"

"It interferes with our working relationship. And could cause problems with the crew."

"When has it interfered with our working relationship?"

"When you've asked me not to go on dangerous missions..."

"Part of the first officer's job."

"That's the problem. I don't always know how to take your suggestions, because I don't always know when you're speaking as my first officer. Or when you have other motivations."

A long pause. "Can you honestly say that your personal feelings have never interfered with one of your command decisions? When you decided to separate Tuvix, or come back for me when Seska had me?"

Another long pause. "No. I can't. That's reason number one why these feelings are so dangerous."

"What's reason number two?"

"They're a distraction. They could make us lose sight of our goal."

"Getting home?"

"That's right."

"What do you want to get home for?" She whirled on him. "It's a serious question. What do you. Want to get home for. Not for the crew and Starfleet--what do you look forward to, personally."

"My family," she said at once.

"Mark?"

"I don't know."

"What does that mean?"

"It means I don't know. I've changed, he might have, too. A lot might have changed."

Chakotay looked at her lovely profile, wondered whether he wanted to know the answer to the next question. "Do you still think about him?"

"Sometimes."

"On New Earth I never noticed his pictures among your things."

"It was there. But, I didn't think about him much. Not the way you mean. I thought he was completely in the past."

"And now you don't?"

"Now I'm not sure. Haven't you ever left something behind, then discovered that it was waiting for you anyway, and that made a difference?"

"Yes. Starfleet." A wry smile touched Kathryn's lips, and he thought: touche. She flew in silence for several minutes. "You think Amelia was going home to G.P.?" he asked.

"Didn't sound to me like she thought much about him when we left her with the other '37s, did it?"

"That could have been like you and New Earth, though. Thinking, since she could never go home again, why bother to try. If they'd finished the flight we're finishing for them..."

"Ah, you know, we already discussed it. Tickertape parade, book tour. She and Fred would probably have gotten bored seeing one another's faces. And he might have gotten dead drunk at the first homecoming party--she never would have flown with him again. G.P. was a good bet."

"A safe bet. Did she strike you as the safe bet type?"

"Hard to say. She did choose to stay behind."

"Which disappoints you."

"It's not the choice I would have made."

"You said you admired her as a kid?"

"She was my...you're going to laugh at me if I tell you this story." He shook his head, but he was already smirking; he couldn't help it, he was certain that if she were sure he would laugh at her, he'd be rather amused at what she was going to say. "What the hell. It was suggested that I talk to a counselor about how hard I was pushing myself." Chakotay bit down on the inside of his lip to resist the wide grin which threatened. "Maybe it was supposed to be a test of my mental health and ability to cope. Anyway, I programmed her as Amelia Earhart. You're not laughing."

He was too stunned. What kind of incompetent school counselor had she had, who had given up on her fast enough to send Kathryn to a hologram? "Why would I laugh?" he asked her. "Sounds pretty emotionally healthy to me, given that they told you to talk to a hologram. Damn, I'd love to meet the idiot who came up with that idea."

"Why?"

"It explains everything."

"Like what?"

"Why you go to holograms for advice when you have live advisors who want to help you. Why you're comfortable playing a subordinate role in holonovels when you'd never put up with it in real life. I didn't know you had a hero-worshipping bone in your body, Kathryn. And I thought it was father-figures you set up as your mentors."

"Boy, you're not pulling any punches, are you," she said wryly. He couldn't tell whether he'd really hurt her feelings or just taken her by surprise. "One at a time. I don't go to holograms for advice. I talk to Da Vinci and a couple of other artists to clear my head, and to give me some perspective. I play subordinate roles because I'd lose all sense of my own position, otherwise--I am supposed to be a superior being on this ship. Even when I choose to accept others as my equal, there is never anyone who can pull rank on me. What do you think I'd be like if I got too used to that?" It was an astute observation, and not one he'd expected her to make; he tipped his head in concession.

"And contrary to what I know you suspect, I have never had an affair with an interactive hologram, so you can stop fretting over the idea that I'm falling in love with idealized historical figures."

"Never?" He spoke a little too loudly to make sure he could be heard over the windnoise, and she flushed brightly.

"I'm not going to pretend that I've never let the masseur in the spa program go a little too far..." She grinned as he grimaced in guilty understanding. He'd failed to terminate the program a couple of times when one of the prostitutes Paris programmed into Sandrine's had taken him in hand, as it were. "Anyway. I have not been relying on holographic men for stimulation, if that's what you've been thinking.

"As for that crack about my father...Chakotay, you know nothing about my father."

"That wasn't a crack about your father. That was a comment about you. As far as I can tell, the three most important people in your life have been him, Admiral Paris, and maybe Mark. Was he a father figure?"

"When we were growing up, he was a scrawny kid, and I had to save his butt," she grinned. "I suppose that when I met him as an adult, he was somewhat paternal. And he knew my family, which made me feel like...my father would have approved. I was having a very rough time. I'd just lost my father and fiance."

"You never talk about him."

"Justin? He was dazzlingly good-looking and I thought I was so lucky. It seems like so long ago. He was brilliant, too. Starfleet to the core. Now I feel like I didn't know him at all. We never talked about pets, we never talked about children...I'm not sure he would have wanted me to stay in Starfleet. He didn't like me risking my life. He'd never have wanted me to have to make a choice between blowing up the Array and getting home to him."

"Sounds like you don't regret not marrying him."

"I regret how I lost him. I'd undo that in an instant. I wonder who I'd be if I hadn't blamed myself for their deaths for so long."

"You seem to have done OK anyway."

"I wonder. Did you ever lose anyone where it changed you so completely that you knew you could never lose anyone like that again?"

"My parents. You think anything less could have driven me to the Maquis?"

"That isn't what I meant. I meant...where you knew you would never let yourself lose anyone that way again. No matter what the circumstances."

He thought for a long moment about what she was saying. "You mean, did I ever lose anyone where it hurt me so much that I refused to let myself love anyone that much again? No. I don't think so."

She sighed at his expression, hands gripping the seat. "It's not just that."

"What?"

"That's not why I can't...this isn't about us. Or at least, that's only..."

"Reason number three," he finished. "What's reason number four?"

"It might not work."

"Kathryn Janeway, it is very unlike you to use that as a reason for not trying something."

"It is when the stakes are high and the odds are low. If I outgrew my high school boyfriend and Justin and possibly Mark, what makes you think we won't both change?"

"I hope we do. I'd hate to think that we were done growing. Why are you such a pessimist?"

"What do you mean? I've always been an optimist! I've always believed that we'll get home..."

"I mean about us. Why don't you think we could grow together? Is it that you don't trust me? I know things haven't been the same since the Borg..."

"It's not that I don't trust you."

"Then what?"

She gestured at the window. "You see that cloud?"

"Yes. What about it?"

"We don't know what's on the other side of it."

"And?"

"There are a hundred and fifty people in that cabin depending on us to get around it. We don't have time to look away."

"Sooner or later, we're going to land, and take a break."

"You want a relationship of stolen moments on shore leave?"

"You know I don't. It doesn't have to be that drastic. Set down every few hours. We're off-duty for more hours a day than we're on."

"When are we off-duty? We're a communicator tap away."

"No one's interrupting us right now. Kathryn, they're probably taking bets on whether we're making love in here instead of flying." Her head jerked around to him. "B'Elanna's asked me, obliquely, about a dozen times. So has Tom. They want you to be happy. They don't care."

"A lot of them would."

"Then that's their problem. A lot of them probably wonder what you're doing on the holodeck by yourself all the time..."

"It's not their business."

"I was just going to say that. You're making excuses, Kathryn."

Kathryn snapped on the autopilot and turned to him. "You're right. I am making excuses. I'm not ready, Chakotay. You were right about New Earth--I was happy there, and I wasn't ready for it to end when it did. And then I started thinking about Amelia. How I didn't want my heroine to have thrown it all away to go live on a desert island--I abhorred the idea. I was thinking about doing the same thing. Every time we talk about getting home not being the goal any longer, that's how it feels to me. Like I've given up the only thing which makes my life matter. I'm not ready to give up on Starfleet, or Mark, or any of the symbols which make me believe in getting home, and it might be a long time before I am. I care about you but there have to be limits. So there it is."

Quite a speech. It sounded a little rehearsed; he wondered how many times she'd considered this discussion before, and what possible outcomes she'd anticipated. "That's fine."

"It is?"

"'I'm not ready' and 'it's impossible' are two different things."

"It might be impossible. I don't think I can stand to have you push and push and push, when I might never be ready."

"Are you telling me to give up and move on? Because I don't know if..."

"No," she said, in a voice filled with despair. "I'm not. I can't do that. Which isn't fair to you."

"I'm not asking for a committment. Joking aside."

"Can I tell you something?" He nodded. "I came back here, without you, last night. I didn't think you'd come back. It occurred to me...that I could program a hologram of you. Don't get angry, I don't know if I could have done it. But I thought, maybe I could have what I wanted without having to compromise...I don't know what I was thinking. I was all mixed up. Anyway, I started the program. That ring was on my finger."

The conversation began to terrify him. Maybe they should have left the safeties on. "What did you do with it?" he asked, not sure he wanted to know.

"Took it off and held it for awhile. And cried."

"Why would you cry?"

"I didn't want to finish the trip without you." Her eyes were wet again. He put his hand over hers on the controls.

"You won't," he promised. "I'm along for the ride."

"Even if we never get there?"

They were a few hours out from Hawaii. From there, Oakland, and back to Miami. The trip Amelia and Fred had intended to complete, around the world at the equator. "Is that ring back in the engine?" Chakotay asked Kathryn.

"In the middle of the casing where it came from," she nodded. "Why?"

"Let's not finish this flight right now," he suggested. "Let's go somewhere different."

"Not finish it?"

"Why put a definitive ending on the story?" He smiled at her. "We could go to Alaska, maybe. Or back to the South Pacific. Find some gimmick to pay for the fuel, we might have to get jobs or something. I think we should see what we should see before we get home."

"That's what explorers are supposed to do." Her expression was guarded, thoughtful, but willing to play along. "Okay. Are we still going on to Hawaii?"

"Why not? Even Oakland if you want. G.P. was supposed to meet Amelia there, wasn't he? It'd make sense to tell him we're taking off. We should let him publish our logs, though--wasn't he supposed to get a book deal out of Amelia's trip?"

"Probably, except I haven't been good about keeping up her journal." Kathryn spread her fingers out on the controls, so that his slipped between hers and they were holding the accelerator together. "I'll have to remember to do something about that. OK, Chakotay. Where would you like to go?"

"Lead on. What was it Admiral Kirk supposedly said? Out there, that-away? Just tell me the direction, I'll try to navigate."

"What Admiral Kirk supposedly said was, 'Second star to the right, and straight on till morning.' I think it's from an old book."

"Different mission. Destination sounds good, though. Anyplace we won't come down too hard." She smiled, nodded in agreement, took the autopilot off and headed them straight up through a cloud into the sunlight.


End file.
